MADness—the Blog

Once upon a time people smoked in movies.  Everybody had a cigarette dangling from their lips, a waft of smoke circling overhead, and a match ready for a pretty girl.  Then Hollywood went cold turkey, kicked the habit.  Seems that nobody ever lights up onscreen anymore.  Except, notably, in the movies below.  The films don’t have much in common except that they’re all new and all worth seeing—and in each one people are smoking like it’s 1943.

That incidental note aside, with the end of the year approaching, I wanted to add some thoughts about new movies.  The Movie Minutes theme on the front page this week also features recent releases, and I’ll be adding some more mini-reviews as time goes on, probably through awards season.  Sometime, I will have a Top 10 (or other number, if appropriate) for 2010, but for now I’m still catching up on the glut of good films now playing.

About three months ago, I had said the crop of 2010 films was not particularly memorable.  That was true at the time, and the end-of-year films, as always, are a world apart.  As grateful as I am for the many good movies out lately, I’d like to see Hollywood serve a few more tasty treats earlier in the year.  I’d bet it would even be better for business.  No reason we should have to starve for nine months before we stuff ourselves at the feast.

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Somewhere (2010)
Sofia Coppola, writer-director
Harris Savides, cinematographer
Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning
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Sofia Coppola’s new film is a meditation on celebrity.  Stephen Dorff stars as Johnny Marco, a modern-day movie star living a pampered, empty existence at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard.  At his level of fame he never has to comb his hair or grow up.  Elle Fanning, in a wonderfully wise and soulful performance, plays his daughter, Cleo, who comes to live with him for a while, until she’s sent off to camp.  At eleven years old, Cleo is the most adult character in the film, and the solitary figure whose spirit seems intact.

Johnny has many women in his life, and some of them he even remembers their name.  But women and men alike want Johnny for what they can get, which is not much, for he is someone with little to give.  Only Cleo shows any true concern for Johnny.  She cares for her father, and she needs him.  She is, we later learn, just a short distance from desperation herself.  She is a talented girl—she figure skates and she cooks (though at Guitar Hero, Johnny outscores her while playing the Police hit So Lonely)—but her biggest gift is the look she gives her dad the morning after he spends the night with an acquaintance in Italy.  That moment is the beginning of the end of the way he has been living.

Somewhere is a quiet film, one that invites you to listen and to see in ways unlike many American movies.  It may, in fact, draw more from Italian film, borrowing from Fellini thematically, and from Antonioni stylistically.  Of course, growing up in the Coppola family probably helped the director understand this particular father-and-daughter relationship, and to her credit it is depicted onscreen with a great deal of tenderness and insight.

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Blue Valentine (2010)
Derek Cianfrance, director
Joey Curtis, Cami Delavigne, Derek Cianfrance, writers
Andrij Parekh, cinematographer
Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams

“A Love Story” is the tagline you’ll find on the Blue Valentine poster.  Don’t be fooled by the title or the billing and take your date on February 14.  It’s not that kind of love story.

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams star as Dean and Cindy, a young married couple who have experienced the mystery of love in all its wonderment and pain.  As the film opens, we see their daughter, Frankie (Faith Wladyka), standing in a field screaming for her dog who had run away.  Like that dog, the love that had given birth to their family is sadly missing.  A sense of desperation grips the parents, and we see them try to find what it was they once had, or to find a way out.  We also get to see, in flashback, who they were when they met, and how they got to the point where it doesn’t work for them anymore.

Blue Valentine is a raw and intimate film, brought to life by the brave and touching performances of Gosling and Williams.  Moments between them are often memorable, and at times, unforgettable.  A song-and-dance one night in a doorway of a shop is one highlight (see the trailer below), when the spark of romance is in the air.  At another time Dean tells Cindy to tell him a joke, and she has one ready, the funniest unfunny joke I’ve heard in a long while.

The movie can be blunt.  I found some moments difficult to watch, and the end, when it came, left me feeling, oddly, unmoved.  I thought perhaps I should be heartbroken, but instead I felt glad it was over.  Is that a failure of the movie, or just the expected reaction to the marriage witnessed onscreen?  I’m still digesting what I took in.  In any case, it is a film worth seeing, though one time may be enough.

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The Fighter (2010)
David O. Russell, director
Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Keith Dorrington (story); Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson (screenplay); writers
Hoyte Van Hoytema, cinematographer
Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo

The Fighter is one of the most conventionally enjoyable films of the year, and it’s the most accessible of the three movies here.  (It would have been a good fit for the Movie Minutes theme linked above, but I hadn’t seen it at the time.)  Set and filmed in Lowell, Massachusetts, the film is based on the real-life story of boxer Micky Ward, with nearly equal time given to his brother, Dicky Ecklund, who hopes to make a comeback in the ring.  Both are local celebs in their working-class neighborhood, though within the family, it’s Dicky who’s the star.

Ward is played by Mark Wahlberg, who still has the boyish looks for the part of an up-and-coming fighter though he’s almost 40.  Christian Bale plays Dicky, nine years older in the film, though in real life Bale is three years younger than Wahlberg.  The family matriarch is Alice, played by Melissa Leo, the iron lady whose sons and daughters dare not cross her.  Rounding out the lead cast is Amy Adams as Charlene, a tough-talking bartender who stirs up the family when she stands up for Micky, her boyfriend.

Dicky is the wild one and attention-getter, and Bale’s performance is a welcome change of pace for him (his Bruce Wayne/Batman persona seems quite the stiff in comparison).  Bale’s uncorkable energy gives the film plenty of lift, especially in the first half-hour.  Leo’s work, as well, is memorable and affecting, and if not always subtle, surprisingly funny.  Adams, too, gives as well as she gets.  It’s Wahlberg’s Ward who’s the quiet one, absorbing the blows of his family and girlfriend, just as he does the blows in the ring.  Ward doesn’t want to choose sides, and he doesn’t want to fight back.  But that’s what he must do, and it’s where the film inevitably leads.  You might say you saw it coming, but it’s still remarkably satisfying when the moment arrives.